No one should be
surprised
that claims about human nature are controversial.
Steven-Pinker-The-Blank-Slate 1
Among the radical scientists and the many intellectuals they have influenced, "determinism" has taken on a meaning that is diametrically opposed to its true meaning.
The word is now used to refer to any claim that people have a tendency to act in certain ways in certain circumstances.
It is a sign of the tenacity of the Blank Slate that a probability greater than zero is equated with a probability of 100 percent.
Zero innateness is the only acceptable belief, and all departures from it are treated as equivalent.
So much for genetic determinism. What about "reductionism" (a concept we examined in Chapter 4) and the claim that Dawkins is "the most reductionist of sociobiologists," one who believes that every trait has its own gene?
Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin try to educate their readers on how living things really work according to their alternative to reductionism, which they call "dialectical biology":
Think, for example, of the baking of a cake: the taste of the product is the result of a complex interaction of components -- such as butter, sugar, and flour -- exposed for various periods to elevated temperatures; it is not dissociable into such-or-such a percent of flour, such-or-such of butter, etc. , although each and every component. . . has its contribution to make to the final product. 28
I will let Dawkins comment:
When put like that, this dialectical biology seems to make a lot of sense. Perhaps even / can be a dialectical biologist. Come to think of it, isn't there something familiar about that cake? Yes, here it is,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? in a 1981 publication by the most reductionist of sociobiologists:
". . . If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe, etc. With minor exceptions such as the cherry on top, there is no one-to-one mapping from words of recipe to 'bits' of cake. The whole recipe maps onto the whole cake. "
I am not, of course, interested in claiming priority for the cake. . . . But what I do hope is that this little coincidence may at least give Rose and Lewontin pause. Could it be that their targets are not quite the nai? vely atomistic reductionists they would desperately like them to be? 29
Indeed, the accusation of reductionism is topsy-turvy because Lewontin and Rose, in their own research, are card- carrying reductionist biologists who {114} explain phenomena at the level of genes and molecules. Dawkins, in contrast, was trained as an ethologist and writes about the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. Wilson, for his part, is a pioneer of research in ecology and a passionate defender of the endangered field that molecular biologists dismissively refer to as "birdsy-woodsy" biology.
All else having failed, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin finally pinned a damning quotation on Dawkins: "They [the genes] control us, body and mind. "30 That does sound pretty deterministic. But what the man wrote was, "They created us, body and mind," which is very different. 31 Lewontin has used the doctored quotation in five different places. 32
Is there any charitable explanation of these "gross errors," as Trivers called them? One possibility may be Dawkins's and Wilson's use of the expression "a gene for X" in discussing the evolution of social behavior like altruism, monogamy, and aggression. Lewontin, Rose, and Gould repeatedly pounce on this language, which refers, they think, to a gene that always causes the behavior and that is the only cause of the behavior. But Dawkins made it clear that the phrase refers to a gene that increases the probability of a behavior compared with alternative genes at that locus. And that probability is an average computed over the other genes that have accompanied it over evolutionary time, and over the environments that the organisms possessing the gene have lived in. This nonreductionist, nondeterminist use of the phrase "a gene for X" is routine among geneticists and evolutionary biologists because it is indispensable to what they do. Some behavior must be affected by some genes, or we could never explain why lions act differently from lambs, why hens sit on their eggs rather than eat them, why stags butt heads but gerbils don't, and so on. The point of evolutionary biology is to explain how these animals ended up with those genes, as opposed to genes with different effects. Now, a given gene may not have the same effect in all environments, nor the same effect in all genomes, but it has to have an average effect. That average is what natural selection selects (all things being equal), and that is all that the "for" means in "a gene for X. " It is hard to believe that Gould and Lewontin, who are evolutionary biologists, could literally have been confused by this usage, but if they were, it would explain twenty- five years of pointless attacks.
How low can one go? Ridiculing an opponent's sex life would seem to come right out of a bad satirical novel on academic life. But Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin bring up a suggestion by the sociologist Steven Goldberg that women are skilled at manipulating others' emotions, and they comment, "What a touching picture of Goldberg's vulnerability to seduction is thus revealed! "33 Later they mention a chapter in Donald Symons's groundbreaking book The Evolution of Human Sexuality which shows that in all societies, sex is typically conceived of as a female service or favor. "In reading sociobiology," they comment, "one has the constant feeling of being a voyeur, peeping into
{115} the autobiographical memoirs of its proponents. "34 Rose was so pleased with this joke that he repeated it fourteen years later in his book Lifelines: Biology Beyond ~Determinism. 35
Any hope that these tactics are a thing of the past was dashed by events in the year 2000. Anthropologists have long been hostile to anyone who discusses human aggression in a biological context. In 1976 the American Anthropological Association nearly passed a motion censuring Sociobiology and banning two symposia on the topic, and in 1983 they did pass one decreeing that Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa was "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading. "36 But that was mild compared with what was to come.
In September 2000, the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel sent the executives of the association a letter (which quickly proliferated throughout cyberspace) warning of a scandal for anthropology that was soon to be divulged in a book by the journalist Patrick Tierney. 37 The alleged perpetrators were the geneticist James Neel, a founder of the modern science of human genetics, and the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, famous for his thirty- year study of the Yanomamo? people of the Amazon rainforest. Turner and Sponsel wrote:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? This nightmarish story -- a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele) -- will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial. As another reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again.
The accusations were truly shocking. Turner and Sponsel charged Neel and Chagnon with deliberately infecting the Yanomamo? with measles (which is often fatal among indigenous peoples) and then withholding medical care in order to test Neel's "eugenically slanted genetic theories. " According to Turner and Sponsel's rendition of these theories, polygynous headmen in foraging societies were biologically fitter than coddled Westerners because they possessed "dominant genes" for "innate ability" that were selected when the headmen engaged in violent competition for wives. Neel believed, said Turner and Sponsel, that "democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental
{116} supports for the weak," is a mistake. They reasoned, "The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females. "
The accusations against Chagnon were just as lurid. In his books and papers on the Yanomamo? , Chagnon had documented their frequent warfare and raiding, and had presented data suggesting that men who had participated in a killing had more wives and offspring than those who had not. 38 (The finding is provocative because if that payoff was typical of the pre-state societies in which humans evolved, the strategic use of violence would have been selected over evolutionary time. ) Turner and Sponsel accused him of fabricating his data, of causing the violence among the Yanomamo? (by sending them into a frenzy over the pots and knives with which he paid his informants), and of staging lethal fights for documentary films. Chagnon's portrayal of the Yanomamo? , they charged, had been used to justify an invasion of gold miners into their territory, abetted by Chagnon's collusion with "sinister" Venezuelan politicians. The Yanomamo? have unquestionably been decimated by disease and by the depredations of the miners, so to lay these tragedies and crimes at Chagnon's feet is literally to accuse him of genocide. For good measure, Turner and Sponsel added that Tierney's book contained "passing references to Chagnon . . . demanding that villagers bring him girls for sex. "
Headlines such as "Scientist 'Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory'" soon appeared around the world, followed by an excerpt of Tierney's book in The New Yorker and then the book itself, titled Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. 39 Under pressure from the publisher's libel lawyers, some of the more sensational accusations in the book had been excised, watered down, or put in the mouths of Venezuelan journalists or untraceable informants. But the substance of the charges remained. 40
Turner and Sponsel admitted that their charge against Neel "remains only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no 'smoking gun' in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel. " That turned out to be an understatement. Within days, scholars with direct knowledge of the events -- historians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and filmmakers -- demolished the charges point by point. 41
Far from being a depraved eugenicist, James Neel (who died shortly before the accusations came out) was an honored and beloved scientist who had consistently attacked eugenics. Indeed, he is often credited with purging human genetics of old eugenic theories and thereby making it a respectable science. The cockamamie theory that Turner and Sponsel attributed to him was incoherent on the face of it and scientifically illiterate (for example, they confused a {117} "dominant gene" with a gene for dominance). In any case there is not the slightest evidence that Neel held any belief close to it. Records show that Neel and Chagnon were surprised by the measles epidemic already in progress and made heroic efforts to contain it. The vaccine they administered, which Tierney had charged was the source of the epidemic, has never caused contagious transmission of measles in the hundreds of millions of people all over the world who have received it, and in all probability the efforts of Neel and Chagnon saved hundreds of Yanomamo? lives. 42 Confronted with public statements from epidemiologists refuting his claims, Tierney lamely said, "Experts I spoke to then had very different opinions than the ones they are expressing in public now. "43
Though no one can prove that Neel and Chagnon did not inadvertently introduce the disease in other places by their very presence, the odds are strongly against it. The Yanomamo? , who are spread out over tens of thousands of square miles, had many more contacts with other Europeans than they did with Chagnon or Neel, because thousands of missionaries, traders, miners, and adventurers move through the area. Indeed, Chagnon himself had documented that a Catholic Salesian missionary was the likely source of an earlier outbreak. Together with Chagnon's criticism of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? mission for providing the Yanomamo? with shotguns, this earned him the missionaries' undying enmity. Not coincidentally, most of Tierney's Yanomamo? informants were associated with the mission.
The specific accusations against Chagnon crumbled as quickly as those against Neel. Chagnon, contrary to Tierney's charges, had not exaggerated Yanomamo? violence or ignored the rest of their lifestyle; in fact, he had meticulously described their techniques for conflict resolution. 44 The suggestion that Chagnon introduced them to violence is simply incredible. Raiding and warfare among the Yanomamo? have been described since the mid-1800s and were documented throughout the first half of the twentieth century, long before Chagnon set foot in the Amazon. (One revealing account was a first-person narrative called Yanodma: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians. )45 And Chagnon's main empirical claims have met the gold standard of science: independent replication. In surveys of rates of death by warfare in pre-state societies, Chagnon's estimates for the Yanomamo? fall well within the range, as we saw in the graph in Chapter 3. 46 Even his most controversial claim, that killers had more wives and offspring, has been replicated in other groups, though there is controversy over the interpretation. It is instructive to compare Tierney's summary of a book supposedly refuting Chagnon with the author's own words. Tierney reports:
Among the Jivaro, head-hunting was a ritual obligation of all males and a required male initiation for teenagers. There, too, most men died in {117} war. Among the Jivaro leaders, however, those who captured the most heads had the fewest wives, and those who had the most wives captured the fewest heads. 47
The author, the anthropologist Elsa Redmond, had actually written:
Yanomamo? men who have killed tend to have more wives, which they have acquired either by abducting them from raiding villages, or by the usual marriage alliances in which they are considered more attractive as mates. The same is true of Jivaro war leaders, who might have four to six wives; as a matter of fact, a great war leader on the Upano River in the 1930s by the name of Tuki or Jose Grande had eleven wives. Distinguished warriors also have more offspring, due mainly to their greater marital success. 48
Turner and Sponsel had long been among Chagnon's most vehement critics (and, not coincidentally, major sources for Tierney's book, despite their professed shock at learning of its contents). They are open about their ideological agenda, which is to defend the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Sponsel wrote that he is committed to "the anthropology of peace" in order to promote a "more nonviolent and peaceful world," which he believes is "latent in human nature. "49 He is opposed to a "Darwinian emphasis on violence and competition" and recently pronounced that "nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human prehistory and that intrahuman killing was . probably rare. "50 He even admits that much of his criticism of Chagnon comes from "an almost automatic reaction against any biological explanation of human behavior, the possibility of biological reductionism, and the associated political implications. "51
Also familiar from the radical science days is an irredentist leftism that considers even moderate and liberal positions reactionary. According to Tierney, Neel "was convinced that democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental support for the weak, violated natural selection"52 and was thus "a eugenic mistake. " But in fact Neel was a political liberal who had protested the diversion of money from poor children to research on aging that he thought would benefit the affluent. He also advocated increasing investment in prenatal care, medical care for children and adolescents, and universal quality education. 53 As for Chagnon, Tierney calls him "a militant anti-Communist and free-market advocate. " His evidence? A quotation from Turner (! ) stating that Chagnon is "a kind of right-wing character who has a paranoid attitude on people he considers lefty. " To explain how he came by these right-wing leanings, Tierney informs readers that Chagnon grew up in a part of rural Michigan "where differences were not welcomed, where {119} xenophobia, linked to anti-Communist feeling, ran high, and where Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong support. " Unaware of the irony, Tierney concludes that Chagnon is an "offspring" of McCarthy who had "received a full portion of [McCarthy's] spirit. " Chagnon, in fact, is a political moderate who had always voted for Democrats. 54
An autobiographical comment in Tierney's preface is revealing: "I gradually changed from being an observer to being an advocate. . . . traditional, objective journalism was no longer an option for me. "55 Tierney believes that accounts of
Yanomamo? violence might be used by invaders to depict them as primitive savages who should be removed or assimilated for their own good. Defaming messengers like Chagnon is, in this view, an ennobling form of social action and a step for the cultural survival of indigenous peoples (despite the fact that Chagnon himself has repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the Yanomamo? ).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The decimation of native Americans by European disease and genocide over five hundred years is indeed one of the great crimes of history. But it is bizarre to blame the crime on a handful of contemporary scientists struggling to document their lifestyle before it vanishes forever under the pressures of assimilation. And it is a dangerous tactic. Surely indigenous peoples have a right to survive in their lands whether or not they -- like all human societies -- are prone to violence and warfare. Self-appointed "advocates" who link the survival of native peoples to the doctrine of the Noble Savage paint themselves into a terrible corner. When the facts show otherwise they either have inadvertently weakened the case for native rights or must e~ngage in any means necessary to suppress the facts.
No one should be surprised that claims about human nature are controversial. Obviously any such claim should be scrutinized and any logical and empirical flaws pointed out, just as with any scientific hypothesis. But the criticism of the new sciences of human nature went well beyond ordinary scholarly debate. It turned into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel. I think there are two reasons for this illiberal behavior.
One is that in the twentieth century the Blank Slate became a sacred doctrine that, in the minds of its defenders, had to be either avowed with a perfect faith or renounced in every aspect. Only such black-and-white thinking could lead people to convert the idea that some aspects of behavior are innate into the idea that all aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic traits influence human affairs into the idea that they determine human affairs. Only if it is theologically necessary for 100 percent of the differences in intelligence to be caused by the environment could anyone be incensed over the mathematical banality that as the proportion of variance due to nongenetic causes
{120} goes down, the proportion due to genetic causes must go up. Only if the mind is required to be a scraped tablet could anyone be outraged by the claim that human nature makes us smile, rather than scowl, when we are pleased.
A second reason is that "radical" thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all. That made it all the more pressing to discredit the heretics making the discoveries. If ordinary standards of scientific argumentation were not doing the trick, other tactics had to be brought in, because a greater good was at stake.
<< {121} >> Chapter 7
The Holy Trinity
Behavioral science is not for sissies. Researchers may wake up to discover that they are despised public figures because of some area they have chosen to explore or some datum they have stumbled upon. Findings on certain topics -- daycare, sexual behavior, childhood memories, the treatment of substance abuse -- may bring on vilification, harassment, intervention by politicians, and physical assault. 1 Even a topic as innocuous as left-handedness turns out to be booby-trapped. In 1991 the psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published statistics in a medical journal showing that lefties on average had more prenatal and perinatal complications, are victims of more accidents, and die younger than righties. They were soon showered with abuse -- including the threat of a lawsuit, numerous death threats, and a ban on the topic in a scholarly journal -- from enraged lefthanders and their advocates. 2
Are the dirty tricks of the preceding chapter just another example of people taking offense at claims about behavior that make them uncomfortable? Or, as I have hinted, are they part of a systematic intellectual current: the attempt to safeguard the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine as a source of meaning and morality? The leading theoreticians of the radical science movement deny that they believe in a blank slate, and it is only fair that their positions be examined carefully. In addition, I will look at the attacks on the sciences of human nature that have come from their political opposites, the contemporary righ~t.
Could the radical scientists really believe in the Blank Slate? The doctrine might seem plausible to some of the scholars who live in a world of disembodied ideas. But could hardheaded boffins who live in a mechanistic world of neurons and genes really think that the psyche soaks into the brain from the surrounding culture? They deny it in the abstract, but when it comes to specifics their position is plainly in the tradition of the tabula rasa social {122} science of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? early twentieth century. Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and the other signatories of the "Against 'Sociobiology'" manifesto wrote:
We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange. 3
Note the tricky framing of the issue. The notion that money is a genetically coded universal is so ridiculous (and not, incidentally, something Wilson ever proposed) that any alternative has to be seen as more plausible than that. But if we take the alternative on its own terms, rather than as one prong in a false dichotomy, Gould and Lewontin seem to be saying that the genetic components of human behavior will be discovered primarily in the "generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping. " The rest of the slate, presumably, is blank.
This debating tactic -- first deny the Blank Slate, then make it look plausible by pitting it against a straw man ? can be found elsewhere in the writings of the radical scientists. Gould, for instance, writes:
Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-biological "environmentalism"; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality, with a brain capable of a full range of human behaviors and predisposed to none, against the idea of biological determinism, with specific genes for specific behavioral traits. 4
The idea of "biological determinism" -- that genes cause behavior with 100 percent certainty -- and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene, are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould's dichotomy would seem to leave "biological potentiality" as the only reasonable choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is "capable of a full range of human behaviors" is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be capable of a full range of human behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the Blank Slate. "Predisposed to none" literally means that all human behaviors have identical probabilities of occurring. So if any person anywhere on the planet has ever committed some act in some circumstance -- abjuring food or sex, impaling himself with spikes, killing her child -- then the brain has no predisposition to avoid that act as compared with the alternatives, such as enjoying food and sex, protecting one's body, or cherishing one's child.
Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin also deny that they are saying that humans are blank slates. 5 But they grant only two concessions to human nature. The first {123} comes not from an appeal to evidence or logic but from their politics: "If [a blank slate] were the case, there could be no social evolution. " Their support for this "argument" consists of an appeal to the authority of Marx, whom they quote as saying, "The materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. "6 Their own view is that "the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is 'in' that nature to construct its own history. "7 The implication is that any other statement about the psychological makeup of our species -- about our capacity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and so on -- is not "sensible. " Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin do make one concession to biology -- not to the organization of the mind and brain but to the size of the body. "Were human beings only six inches tall there could be no human culture at all as we understand it," they note, because a Lilliputian could not control fire, break rocks with a pick-axe, or carry a brain big enough to support language. It is their only acknowledgment of the possibility that human biology affects human social life.
Eight years later Lewontin reiterated this theory of what is innate in humans: "The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many connections as it has. "8 Once again, the rhetoric has to be unpacked with care. If we take the sentence literally, Lewontin is referring only to "the most important fact" about human genes. Then again, if we take it literally, the sentence is meaningless. How could one ever rank-order the thousands of effects of the genes, all necessary to our existence, and point to one or two at the top of the list? Is our stature more important than the fact that we have a heart, or lungs, or eyes? Is our synapse number more important than our sodium pumps, without which our neurons would fill up with positive ions and shut down? So taking the sentence literally is pointless. The only sensible reading, and the one that fits in the context, is that these are the only important facts about human genes for the human mind. The tens of thousands of genes that are expressed primarily or exclusively in the brain do nothing important but give it lots of connections; the pattern of connections and the organization of the brain (into structures like the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and a cerebral cortex divided into areas) are random, or might as well be. The genes do not give the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? brain multiple memory systems, complicated visual and motor tracts, an ability to learn a language, or a repertoire of emotions (or else the genes do provide these faculties, but they are not "important").
In an update of John Watson's claim that he could turn any infant into a "doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, {124} regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors," Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket precis claims that "our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit. "9 Watson admitted he was "going beyond my facts," which was forgivable because at the time he wrote there were no facts. But the declaration on Lewontin's book that any individual can assume any identity (even granting the equivalence of races, sexes, and classes), in defiance of six decades of research in behavioral genetics, is an avowal of faith of uncommon purity. And in a passage that re-erects Durkheim's wall between the biological and the cultural, Lewontin concludes a 1992 book by writing that the genes "have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action. "10
So while Gould, Lewontin, and Rose deny that they believe in a blank slate, their concessions to evolution and genetics -- that they let us eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, grow bigger than a squirrel, and bring about social change -- reveal them to be empiricists more extreme than Locke himself, who at least recognized the need for an innate faculty of "understanding. " ~
The Noble Savage, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been "strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies. " I looked up these "studies," which were collected in Ashley Montagu's Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). 11 Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, "The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong. ") In any case, the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare. Nor did Montagu's summary essay, which simply rehashed attacks on the concept of "instinct" from decades of behaviorists. One of the only chapters with data "refuted" Lorenz's claims about warfare and raiding in the Ute Indians by saying they didn't do it any more than other native groups!
Twenty years later, Gould wrote that "Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species. " His new argument comes from what he calls the Great {125} Asymmetry. It is "an essential truth," he writes, that "good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. "12 Moreover, "we perform 10,000 acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly balancing, moment of cruelty. "13 The statistics making up this "essential truth" are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are definitely not "good and kind people," make up about three or four percent of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent. 14 But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as "evil and destructive," it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it "evil. " Also, does it make sense to judge our entire species, as if we were standing en masse at the pearly gates? The issue is not whether our species is "evil and destructive" but whether we house evil and destructive motives, together with the beneficent and constructive ones. If we do, one can try to understand what they are and how they work.
Gould has objected to any attempt to understand the motives for war in the context of human evolution, because "each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence; each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan. "15 Once again a ratio has been conjured out of the blue; the data reviewed in Chapter 3 show that "pacific clans" either do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the "murderous bands. "16 But for Gould, such facts are beside the point, because he finds it necessary to believe in the pacific clans on moral grounds. Only if humans lack any predisposition for good or evil or anything else, he suggests, do we have grounds for opposing genocide. Here is how he imagines the position of the evolutionary psychologists he disagrees with:
Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source -- and as an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility. . . . A group devoid of xenophobia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others replete with genes to encode
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? a propensity for such categorization and destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are programmed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged (and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances may now spell our undoing (or at least propagate our tragedies) -- but we cannot be blamed for these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the night. 17 {126}
In this passage Gould presents a more-or-less reasonable summary of why scientists might think that human violence can be illuminated by evolution. But then he casually slips in some outrageous non sequiturs ("an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility," "we cannot be blamed"), as if the scientists had no choice but to believe those, too. He concludes his essay:
In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered. . . , and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel. . . . Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately, shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise. 18
The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a sta~nd in favor of genocide!
What about the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine? The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can collectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle's description of Descartes's dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in discussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which they dedicated to Friedrich Engels ("who got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted"). In it they wrote, "As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy. "19 In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they "share a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just -- a socialist -- society" and see their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society. "20 At one point they frame their disagreement with "reductionism" as follows:
Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the . . . revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power {127} based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous. 21
Lewontin and Rose's commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment -- Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place. 22 The very act of separating them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment. " That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are "ontologically coterminous" -- not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.
Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determinists" with the declaration "We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"23 -- presumably echoing Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it lust as they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. " But Rose never explains who the "we" is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.
Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: "Which . . . shall we choose? . . . Let us take this stand. . . . We can do otherwise. " And he too cites Marx's "wonderful aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will:
Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as "free will. "24 {128}
Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym "volition" (with or without "elements of difference," whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness. " Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.
The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to "bourgeois" democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses "bourgeois" as an epithet. ) If the "we" is truly unfettered by biology, then once "we" see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the "we" is an imperfect product of evolution -- limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority -- then "we" had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which "we" are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect hu~mans.
The Ghost in the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left.
So much for genetic determinism. What about "reductionism" (a concept we examined in Chapter 4) and the claim that Dawkins is "the most reductionist of sociobiologists," one who believes that every trait has its own gene?
Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin try to educate their readers on how living things really work according to their alternative to reductionism, which they call "dialectical biology":
Think, for example, of the baking of a cake: the taste of the product is the result of a complex interaction of components -- such as butter, sugar, and flour -- exposed for various periods to elevated temperatures; it is not dissociable into such-or-such a percent of flour, such-or-such of butter, etc. , although each and every component. . . has its contribution to make to the final product. 28
I will let Dawkins comment:
When put like that, this dialectical biology seems to make a lot of sense. Perhaps even / can be a dialectical biologist. Come to think of it, isn't there something familiar about that cake? Yes, here it is,
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? in a 1981 publication by the most reductionist of sociobiologists:
". . . If we follow a particular recipe, word for word, in a cookery book, what finally emerges from the oven is a cake. We cannot now break the cake into its component crumbs and say: this crumb corresponds to the first word in the recipe; this crumb corresponds to the second word in the recipe, etc. With minor exceptions such as the cherry on top, there is no one-to-one mapping from words of recipe to 'bits' of cake. The whole recipe maps onto the whole cake. "
I am not, of course, interested in claiming priority for the cake. . . . But what I do hope is that this little coincidence may at least give Rose and Lewontin pause. Could it be that their targets are not quite the nai? vely atomistic reductionists they would desperately like them to be? 29
Indeed, the accusation of reductionism is topsy-turvy because Lewontin and Rose, in their own research, are card- carrying reductionist biologists who {114} explain phenomena at the level of genes and molecules. Dawkins, in contrast, was trained as an ethologist and writes about the behavior of animals in their natural habitat. Wilson, for his part, is a pioneer of research in ecology and a passionate defender of the endangered field that molecular biologists dismissively refer to as "birdsy-woodsy" biology.
All else having failed, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin finally pinned a damning quotation on Dawkins: "They [the genes] control us, body and mind. "30 That does sound pretty deterministic. But what the man wrote was, "They created us, body and mind," which is very different. 31 Lewontin has used the doctored quotation in five different places. 32
Is there any charitable explanation of these "gross errors," as Trivers called them? One possibility may be Dawkins's and Wilson's use of the expression "a gene for X" in discussing the evolution of social behavior like altruism, monogamy, and aggression. Lewontin, Rose, and Gould repeatedly pounce on this language, which refers, they think, to a gene that always causes the behavior and that is the only cause of the behavior. But Dawkins made it clear that the phrase refers to a gene that increases the probability of a behavior compared with alternative genes at that locus. And that probability is an average computed over the other genes that have accompanied it over evolutionary time, and over the environments that the organisms possessing the gene have lived in. This nonreductionist, nondeterminist use of the phrase "a gene for X" is routine among geneticists and evolutionary biologists because it is indispensable to what they do. Some behavior must be affected by some genes, or we could never explain why lions act differently from lambs, why hens sit on their eggs rather than eat them, why stags butt heads but gerbils don't, and so on. The point of evolutionary biology is to explain how these animals ended up with those genes, as opposed to genes with different effects. Now, a given gene may not have the same effect in all environments, nor the same effect in all genomes, but it has to have an average effect. That average is what natural selection selects (all things being equal), and that is all that the "for" means in "a gene for X. " It is hard to believe that Gould and Lewontin, who are evolutionary biologists, could literally have been confused by this usage, but if they were, it would explain twenty- five years of pointless attacks.
How low can one go? Ridiculing an opponent's sex life would seem to come right out of a bad satirical novel on academic life. But Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin bring up a suggestion by the sociologist Steven Goldberg that women are skilled at manipulating others' emotions, and they comment, "What a touching picture of Goldberg's vulnerability to seduction is thus revealed! "33 Later they mention a chapter in Donald Symons's groundbreaking book The Evolution of Human Sexuality which shows that in all societies, sex is typically conceived of as a female service or favor. "In reading sociobiology," they comment, "one has the constant feeling of being a voyeur, peeping into
{115} the autobiographical memoirs of its proponents. "34 Rose was so pleased with this joke that he repeated it fourteen years later in his book Lifelines: Biology Beyond ~Determinism. 35
Any hope that these tactics are a thing of the past was dashed by events in the year 2000. Anthropologists have long been hostile to anyone who discusses human aggression in a biological context. In 1976 the American Anthropological Association nearly passed a motion censuring Sociobiology and banning two symposia on the topic, and in 1983 they did pass one decreeing that Derek Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa was "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading. "36 But that was mild compared with what was to come.
In September 2000, the anthropologists Terence Turner and Leslie Sponsel sent the executives of the association a letter (which quickly proliferated throughout cyberspace) warning of a scandal for anthropology that was soon to be divulged in a book by the journalist Patrick Tierney. 37 The alleged perpetrators were the geneticist James Neel, a founder of the modern science of human genetics, and the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, famous for his thirty- year study of the Yanomamo? people of the Amazon rainforest. Turner and Sponsel wrote:
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? This nightmarish story -- a real anthropological heart of darkness beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad (though not, perhaps, a Josef Mengele) -- will be seen (rightly in our view) by the public, as well as most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial. As another reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates received their lies as the introductory substance of anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again.
The accusations were truly shocking. Turner and Sponsel charged Neel and Chagnon with deliberately infecting the Yanomamo? with measles (which is often fatal among indigenous peoples) and then withholding medical care in order to test Neel's "eugenically slanted genetic theories. " According to Turner and Sponsel's rendition of these theories, polygynous headmen in foraging societies were biologically fitter than coddled Westerners because they possessed "dominant genes" for "innate ability" that were selected when the headmen engaged in violent competition for wives. Neel believed, said Turner and Sponsel, that "democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental
{116} supports for the weak," is a mistake. They reasoned, "The political implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which genetically superior males could emerge into dominance, eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females. "
The accusations against Chagnon were just as lurid. In his books and papers on the Yanomamo? , Chagnon had documented their frequent warfare and raiding, and had presented data suggesting that men who had participated in a killing had more wives and offspring than those who had not. 38 (The finding is provocative because if that payoff was typical of the pre-state societies in which humans evolved, the strategic use of violence would have been selected over evolutionary time. ) Turner and Sponsel accused him of fabricating his data, of causing the violence among the Yanomamo? (by sending them into a frenzy over the pots and knives with which he paid his informants), and of staging lethal fights for documentary films. Chagnon's portrayal of the Yanomamo? , they charged, had been used to justify an invasion of gold miners into their territory, abetted by Chagnon's collusion with "sinister" Venezuelan politicians. The Yanomamo? have unquestionably been decimated by disease and by the depredations of the miners, so to lay these tragedies and crimes at Chagnon's feet is literally to accuse him of genocide. For good measure, Turner and Sponsel added that Tierney's book contained "passing references to Chagnon . . . demanding that villagers bring him girls for sex. "
Headlines such as "Scientist 'Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory'" soon appeared around the world, followed by an excerpt of Tierney's book in The New Yorker and then the book itself, titled Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon. 39 Under pressure from the publisher's libel lawyers, some of the more sensational accusations in the book had been excised, watered down, or put in the mouths of Venezuelan journalists or untraceable informants. But the substance of the charges remained. 40
Turner and Sponsel admitted that their charge against Neel "remains only an inference in the present state of our knowledge: there is no 'smoking gun' in the form of a written text or recorded speech by Neel. " That turned out to be an understatement. Within days, scholars with direct knowledge of the events -- historians, epidemiologists, anthropologists, and filmmakers -- demolished the charges point by point. 41
Far from being a depraved eugenicist, James Neel (who died shortly before the accusations came out) was an honored and beloved scientist who had consistently attacked eugenics. Indeed, he is often credited with purging human genetics of old eugenic theories and thereby making it a respectable science. The cockamamie theory that Turner and Sponsel attributed to him was incoherent on the face of it and scientifically illiterate (for example, they confused a {117} "dominant gene" with a gene for dominance). In any case there is not the slightest evidence that Neel held any belief close to it. Records show that Neel and Chagnon were surprised by the measles epidemic already in progress and made heroic efforts to contain it. The vaccine they administered, which Tierney had charged was the source of the epidemic, has never caused contagious transmission of measles in the hundreds of millions of people all over the world who have received it, and in all probability the efforts of Neel and Chagnon saved hundreds of Yanomamo? lives. 42 Confronted with public statements from epidemiologists refuting his claims, Tierney lamely said, "Experts I spoke to then had very different opinions than the ones they are expressing in public now. "43
Though no one can prove that Neel and Chagnon did not inadvertently introduce the disease in other places by their very presence, the odds are strongly against it. The Yanomamo? , who are spread out over tens of thousands of square miles, had many more contacts with other Europeans than they did with Chagnon or Neel, because thousands of missionaries, traders, miners, and adventurers move through the area. Indeed, Chagnon himself had documented that a Catholic Salesian missionary was the likely source of an earlier outbreak. Together with Chagnon's criticism of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? mission for providing the Yanomamo? with shotguns, this earned him the missionaries' undying enmity. Not coincidentally, most of Tierney's Yanomamo? informants were associated with the mission.
The specific accusations against Chagnon crumbled as quickly as those against Neel. Chagnon, contrary to Tierney's charges, had not exaggerated Yanomamo? violence or ignored the rest of their lifestyle; in fact, he had meticulously described their techniques for conflict resolution. 44 The suggestion that Chagnon introduced them to violence is simply incredible. Raiding and warfare among the Yanomamo? have been described since the mid-1800s and were documented throughout the first half of the twentieth century, long before Chagnon set foot in the Amazon. (One revealing account was a first-person narrative called Yanodma: The Story of Helena Valero, a Girl Kidnapped by Amazonian Indians. )45 And Chagnon's main empirical claims have met the gold standard of science: independent replication. In surveys of rates of death by warfare in pre-state societies, Chagnon's estimates for the Yanomamo? fall well within the range, as we saw in the graph in Chapter 3. 46 Even his most controversial claim, that killers had more wives and offspring, has been replicated in other groups, though there is controversy over the interpretation. It is instructive to compare Tierney's summary of a book supposedly refuting Chagnon with the author's own words. Tierney reports:
Among the Jivaro, head-hunting was a ritual obligation of all males and a required male initiation for teenagers. There, too, most men died in {117} war. Among the Jivaro leaders, however, those who captured the most heads had the fewest wives, and those who had the most wives captured the fewest heads. 47
The author, the anthropologist Elsa Redmond, had actually written:
Yanomamo? men who have killed tend to have more wives, which they have acquired either by abducting them from raiding villages, or by the usual marriage alliances in which they are considered more attractive as mates. The same is true of Jivaro war leaders, who might have four to six wives; as a matter of fact, a great war leader on the Upano River in the 1930s by the name of Tuki or Jose Grande had eleven wives. Distinguished warriors also have more offspring, due mainly to their greater marital success. 48
Turner and Sponsel had long been among Chagnon's most vehement critics (and, not coincidentally, major sources for Tierney's book, despite their professed shock at learning of its contents). They are open about their ideological agenda, which is to defend the doctrine of the Noble Savage. Sponsel wrote that he is committed to "the anthropology of peace" in order to promote a "more nonviolent and peaceful world," which he believes is "latent in human nature. "49 He is opposed to a "Darwinian emphasis on violence and competition" and recently pronounced that "nonviolence and peace were likely the norm throughout most of human prehistory and that intrahuman killing was . probably rare. "50 He even admits that much of his criticism of Chagnon comes from "an almost automatic reaction against any biological explanation of human behavior, the possibility of biological reductionism, and the associated political implications. "51
Also familiar from the radical science days is an irredentist leftism that considers even moderate and liberal positions reactionary. According to Tierney, Neel "was convinced that democracy, with its free breeding for the masses and its sentimental support for the weak, violated natural selection"52 and was thus "a eugenic mistake. " But in fact Neel was a political liberal who had protested the diversion of money from poor children to research on aging that he thought would benefit the affluent. He also advocated increasing investment in prenatal care, medical care for children and adolescents, and universal quality education. 53 As for Chagnon, Tierney calls him "a militant anti-Communist and free-market advocate. " His evidence? A quotation from Turner (! ) stating that Chagnon is "a kind of right-wing character who has a paranoid attitude on people he considers lefty. " To explain how he came by these right-wing leanings, Tierney informs readers that Chagnon grew up in a part of rural Michigan "where differences were not welcomed, where {119} xenophobia, linked to anti-Communist feeling, ran high, and where Senator Joseph McCarthy enjoyed strong support. " Unaware of the irony, Tierney concludes that Chagnon is an "offspring" of McCarthy who had "received a full portion of [McCarthy's] spirit. " Chagnon, in fact, is a political moderate who had always voted for Democrats. 54
An autobiographical comment in Tierney's preface is revealing: "I gradually changed from being an observer to being an advocate. . . . traditional, objective journalism was no longer an option for me. "55 Tierney believes that accounts of
Yanomamo? violence might be used by invaders to depict them as primitive savages who should be removed or assimilated for their own good. Defaming messengers like Chagnon is, in this view, an ennobling form of social action and a step for the cultural survival of indigenous peoples (despite the fact that Chagnon himself has repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the Yanomamo? ).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? The decimation of native Americans by European disease and genocide over five hundred years is indeed one of the great crimes of history. But it is bizarre to blame the crime on a handful of contemporary scientists struggling to document their lifestyle before it vanishes forever under the pressures of assimilation. And it is a dangerous tactic. Surely indigenous peoples have a right to survive in their lands whether or not they -- like all human societies -- are prone to violence and warfare. Self-appointed "advocates" who link the survival of native peoples to the doctrine of the Noble Savage paint themselves into a terrible corner. When the facts show otherwise they either have inadvertently weakened the case for native rights or must e~ngage in any means necessary to suppress the facts.
No one should be surprised that claims about human nature are controversial. Obviously any such claim should be scrutinized and any logical and empirical flaws pointed out, just as with any scientific hypothesis. But the criticism of the new sciences of human nature went well beyond ordinary scholarly debate. It turned into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel. I think there are two reasons for this illiberal behavior.
One is that in the twentieth century the Blank Slate became a sacred doctrine that, in the minds of its defenders, had to be either avowed with a perfect faith or renounced in every aspect. Only such black-and-white thinking could lead people to convert the idea that some aspects of behavior are innate into the idea that all aspects of behavior are innate, or convert the proposal that genetic traits influence human affairs into the idea that they determine human affairs. Only if it is theologically necessary for 100 percent of the differences in intelligence to be caused by the environment could anyone be incensed over the mathematical banality that as the proportion of variance due to nongenetic causes
{120} goes down, the proportion due to genetic causes must go up. Only if the mind is required to be a scraped tablet could anyone be outraged by the claim that human nature makes us smile, rather than scowl, when we are pleased.
A second reason is that "radical" thinkers got trapped by their own moralizing. Once they staked themselves to the lazy argument that racism, sexism, war, and political inequality were factually incorrect because there is no such thing as human nature (as opposed to being morally despicable regardless of the details of human nature), every discovery about human nature was, by their own reasoning, tantamount to saying that those scourges were not so bad after all. That made it all the more pressing to discredit the heretics making the discoveries. If ordinary standards of scientific argumentation were not doing the trick, other tactics had to be brought in, because a greater good was at stake.
<< {121} >> Chapter 7
The Holy Trinity
Behavioral science is not for sissies. Researchers may wake up to discover that they are despised public figures because of some area they have chosen to explore or some datum they have stumbled upon. Findings on certain topics -- daycare, sexual behavior, childhood memories, the treatment of substance abuse -- may bring on vilification, harassment, intervention by politicians, and physical assault. 1 Even a topic as innocuous as left-handedness turns out to be booby-trapped. In 1991 the psychologists Stanley Coren and Diane Halpern published statistics in a medical journal showing that lefties on average had more prenatal and perinatal complications, are victims of more accidents, and die younger than righties. They were soon showered with abuse -- including the threat of a lawsuit, numerous death threats, and a ban on the topic in a scholarly journal -- from enraged lefthanders and their advocates. 2
Are the dirty tricks of the preceding chapter just another example of people taking offense at claims about behavior that make them uncomfortable? Or, as I have hinted, are they part of a systematic intellectual current: the attempt to safeguard the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine as a source of meaning and morality? The leading theoreticians of the radical science movement deny that they believe in a blank slate, and it is only fair that their positions be examined carefully. In addition, I will look at the attacks on the sciences of human nature that have come from their political opposites, the contemporary righ~t.
Could the radical scientists really believe in the Blank Slate? The doctrine might seem plausible to some of the scholars who live in a world of disembodied ideas. But could hardheaded boffins who live in a mechanistic world of neurons and genes really think that the psyche soaks into the brain from the surrounding culture? They deny it in the abstract, but when it comes to specifics their position is plainly in the tradition of the tabula rasa social {122} science of the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? early twentieth century. Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and the other signatories of the "Against 'Sociobiology'" manifesto wrote:
We are not denying that there are genetic components to human behavior. But we suspect that human biological universals are to be discovered more in the generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping than in such specific and highly variable habits as warfare, sexual exploitation of women and the use of money as a medium of exchange. 3
Note the tricky framing of the issue. The notion that money is a genetically coded universal is so ridiculous (and not, incidentally, something Wilson ever proposed) that any alternative has to be seen as more plausible than that. But if we take the alternative on its own terms, rather than as one prong in a false dichotomy, Gould and Lewontin seem to be saying that the genetic components of human behavior will be discovered primarily in the "generalities of eating, excreting, and sleeping. " The rest of the slate, presumably, is blank.
This debating tactic -- first deny the Blank Slate, then make it look plausible by pitting it against a straw man ? can be found elsewhere in the writings of the radical scientists. Gould, for instance, writes:
Thus, my criticism of Wilson does not invoke a non-biological "environmentalism"; it merely pits the concept of biological potentiality, with a brain capable of a full range of human behaviors and predisposed to none, against the idea of biological determinism, with specific genes for specific behavioral traits. 4
The idea of "biological determinism" -- that genes cause behavior with 100 percent certainty -- and the idea that every behavioral trait has its own gene, are obviously daft (never mind that Wilson never embraced them). So Gould's dichotomy would seem to leave "biological potentiality" as the only reasonable choice. But what does that mean? The claim that the brain is "capable of a full range of human behaviors" is almost a tautology: how could the brain not be capable of a full range of human behaviors? And the claim that the brain is not predisposed to any human behavior is just a version of the Blank Slate. "Predisposed to none" literally means that all human behaviors have identical probabilities of occurring. So if any person anywhere on the planet has ever committed some act in some circumstance -- abjuring food or sex, impaling himself with spikes, killing her child -- then the brain has no predisposition to avoid that act as compared with the alternatives, such as enjoying food and sex, protecting one's body, or cherishing one's child.
Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin also deny that they are saying that humans are blank slates. 5 But they grant only two concessions to human nature. The first {123} comes not from an appeal to evidence or logic but from their politics: "If [a blank slate] were the case, there could be no social evolution. " Their support for this "argument" consists of an appeal to the authority of Marx, whom they quote as saying, "The materialist doctrine that men are the products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men that change circumstances and that the educator himself needs educating. "6 Their own view is that "the only sensible thing to say about human nature is that it is 'in' that nature to construct its own history. "7 The implication is that any other statement about the psychological makeup of our species -- about our capacity for language, our love of family, our sexual emotions, our typical fears, and so on -- is not "sensible. " Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin do make one concession to biology -- not to the organization of the mind and brain but to the size of the body. "Were human beings only six inches tall there could be no human culture at all as we understand it," they note, because a Lilliputian could not control fire, break rocks with a pick-axe, or carry a brain big enough to support language. It is their only acknowledgment of the possibility that human biology affects human social life.
Eight years later Lewontin reiterated this theory of what is innate in humans: "The most important fact about human genes is that they help to make us as big as we are and to have a central nervous system with as many connections as it has. "8 Once again, the rhetoric has to be unpacked with care. If we take the sentence literally, Lewontin is referring only to "the most important fact" about human genes. Then again, if we take it literally, the sentence is meaningless. How could one ever rank-order the thousands of effects of the genes, all necessary to our existence, and point to one or two at the top of the list? Is our stature more important than the fact that we have a heart, or lungs, or eyes? Is our synapse number more important than our sodium pumps, without which our neurons would fill up with positive ions and shut down? So taking the sentence literally is pointless. The only sensible reading, and the one that fits in the context, is that these are the only important facts about human genes for the human mind. The tens of thousands of genes that are expressed primarily or exclusively in the brain do nothing important but give it lots of connections; the pattern of connections and the organization of the brain (into structures like the hippocampus, amygdala, hypothalamus, and a cerebral cortex divided into areas) are random, or might as well be. The genes do not give the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? brain multiple memory systems, complicated visual and motor tracts, an ability to learn a language, or a repertoire of emotions (or else the genes do provide these faculties, but they are not "important").
In an update of John Watson's claim that he could turn any infant into a "doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, {124} regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors," Lewontin wrote a book whose jacket precis claims that "our genetic endowments confer a plasticity of psychic and physical development, so that in the course of our lives, from conception to death, each of us, irrespective of race, class, or sex, can develop virtually any identity that lies within the human ambit. "9 Watson admitted he was "going beyond my facts," which was forgivable because at the time he wrote there were no facts. But the declaration on Lewontin's book that any individual can assume any identity (even granting the equivalence of races, sexes, and classes), in defiance of six decades of research in behavioral genetics, is an avowal of faith of uncommon purity. And in a passage that re-erects Durkheim's wall between the biological and the cultural, Lewontin concludes a 1992 book by writing that the genes "have been replaced by an entirely new level of causation, that of social interaction with its own laws and its own nature that can be understood and explored only through that unique form of experience, social action. "10
So while Gould, Lewontin, and Rose deny that they believe in a blank slate, their concessions to evolution and genetics -- that they let us eat, sleep, urinate, defecate, grow bigger than a squirrel, and bring about social change -- reveal them to be empiricists more extreme than Locke himself, who at least recognized the need for an innate faculty of "understanding. " ~
The Noble Savage, too, is a cherished doctrine among critics of the sciences of human nature. In Sociobiology, Wilson mentioned that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory. The against-sociobiologists declared that this had been "strongly rebutted both on the basis of historical and anthropological studies. " I looked up these "studies," which were collected in Ashley Montagu's Man and Aggression. In fact they were just hostile reviews of books by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, the playwright Robert Ardrey, and the novelist William Golding (author of Lord of the Flies). 11 Some of the criticisms were, to be sure, deserved: Ardrey and Lorenz believed in archaic theories such as that aggression was like the discharge of a hydraulic pressure and that evolution acted for the good of the species. But far stronger criticisms of Ardrey and Lorenz had been made by the sociobiologists themselves. (On the second page of The Selfish Gene, for example, Dawkins wrote, "The trouble with these books is that the authors got it totally and utterly wrong. ") In any case, the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare. Nor did Montagu's summary essay, which simply rehashed attacks on the concept of "instinct" from decades of behaviorists. One of the only chapters with data "refuted" Lorenz's claims about warfare and raiding in the Ute Indians by saying they didn't do it any more than other native groups!
Twenty years later, Gould wrote that "Homo sapiens is not an evil or destructive species. " His new argument comes from what he calls the Great {125} Asymmetry. It is "an essential truth," he writes, that "good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one. "12 Moreover, "we perform 10,000 acts of small and unrecorded kindness for each surpassingly rare, but sadly balancing, moment of cruelty. "13 The statistics making up this "essential truth" are pulled out of the air and are certainly wrong: psychopaths, who are definitely not "good and kind people," make up about three or four percent of the male population, not several hundredths of a percent. 14 But even if we accept the figures, the argument assumes that for a species to count as "evil and destructive," it would have to be evil and destructive all the time, like a deranged postal worker on a permanent rampage. It is precisely because one act can balance ten thousand kind ones that we call it "evil. " Also, does it make sense to judge our entire species, as if we were standing en masse at the pearly gates? The issue is not whether our species is "evil and destructive" but whether we house evil and destructive motives, together with the beneficent and constructive ones. If we do, one can try to understand what they are and how they work.
Gould has objected to any attempt to understand the motives for war in the context of human evolution, because "each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence; each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan. "15 Once again a ratio has been conjured out of the blue; the data reviewed in Chapter 3 show that "pacific clans" either do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the "murderous bands. "16 But for Gould, such facts are beside the point, because he finds it necessary to believe in the pacific clans on moral grounds. Only if humans lack any predisposition for good or evil or anything else, he suggests, do we have grounds for opposing genocide. Here is how he imagines the position of the evolutionary psychologists he disagrees with:
Perhaps the most popular of all explanations for our genocidal capacity cites evolutionary biology as an unfortunate source -- and as an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility. . . . A group devoid of xenophobia and unschooled in murder might invariably succumb to others replete with genes to encode
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? a propensity for such categorization and destruction. Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, will band together and systematically kill the members of adjacent groups. Perhaps we are programmed to act in such a manner as well. These grisly propensities once promoted the survival of groups armed with nothing more destructive than teeth and stones. In a world of nuclear bombs, such unchanged (and perhaps unchangeable) inheritances may now spell our undoing (or at least propagate our tragedies) -- but we cannot be blamed for these moral failings. Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the night. 17 {126}
In this passage Gould presents a more-or-less reasonable summary of why scientists might think that human violence can be illuminated by evolution. But then he casually slips in some outrageous non sequiturs ("an ultimate escape from full moral responsibility," "we cannot be blamed"), as if the scientists had no choice but to believe those, too. He concludes his essay:
In 1525, thousands of German peasants were slaughtered. . . , and Michelangelo worked on the Medici Chapel. . . . Both sides of this dichotomy represent our common, evolved humanity. Which, ultimately, shall we choose? As to the potential path of genocide and destruction, let us take this stand. It need not be. We can do otherwise. 18
The implication is that anyone who believes that the causes of genocide might be illuminated by an understanding of the evolved makeup of human beings is in fact taking a sta~nd in favor of genocide!
What about the third member of the trinity, the Ghost in the Machine? The radical scientists are thoroughgoing materialists and could hardly believe in an immaterial soul. But they are equally uncomfortable with any clearly stated alternative, because it would cramp their political belief that we can collectively implement any social arrangement we choose. To update Ryle's description of Descartes's dilemma: as men of scientific acumen they cannot but endorse the claims of biology, yet as political men they cannot accept the discouraging rider to those claims, namely that human nature differs only in degree of complexity from clockwork.
Ordinarily it is not cricket to bring up the political beliefs of scholars in discussing their scholarly arguments, but it is Lewontin and Rose who insist that their scientific beliefs are inseparable from their political ones. Lewontin wrote a book with the biologist Richard Levins called The Dialectical Biologist, which they dedicated to Friedrich Engels ("who got it wrong a lot of the time but got it right where it counted"). In it they wrote, "As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide our research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy. "19 In Not in Our Genes, Lewontin, Rose, and Kamin declared that they "share a commitment to the prospect of a more socially just -- a socialist -- society" and see their "critical science as an integral part of the struggle to create that society. "20 At one point they frame their disagreement with "reductionism" as follows:
Against this economic reduction as the explanatory principle underlying all human behavior, we could counterpose the . . . revolutionary practitioners and theorists like Mao Tse-tung on the power of human consciousness in both interpreting and changing the world, a power {127} based on an understanding of the essential dialectical unity of the biological and the social, not as two distinct spheres, or separable components of action, but as ontologically coterminous. 21
Lewontin and Rose's commitment to the "dialectical" approach of Marx, Engels, and Mao explains why they deny human nature and also deny that they deny it. The very idea of a durable human nature that can be discussed separately from its ever-changing interaction with the environment is, in their view, a dull-witted mistake. The mistake lies not just in ignoring interactions with the environment -- Lewontin and Rose already knocked over the straw men who do that. The deeper mistake, as they see it, lies in trying to analyze behavior as an interaction between human nature and the human environment (including society) in the first place. 22 The very act of separating them in one's mind, even for the purpose of figuring out how the two interact, "supposes the alienation of the organism and the environment. " That contradicts the principles of dialectical understanding, which says that the two are "ontologically coterminous" -- not just in the trivial sense that no organism lives in a vacuum, but in the sense that they are inseparable in every aspect of their being.
Since the dialectic between organism and environment constantly changes over historical time, with neither one directly causing the other, organisms can alter that dialectic. Thus Rose repeatedly counters the "determinists" with the declaration "We have the ability to construct our own futures, albeit not in circumstances of our own choosing"23 -- presumably echoing Marx's statement that "men make their own history, but they do not make it lust as they
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? please; they make it under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. " But Rose never explains who the "we" is, if not highly structured neural circuits, which must get that structure in part from genes and evolution. We can call this doctrine the Pronoun in the Machine.
Gould is not a doctrinarian like Rose and Lewontin, but he too uses the first-person plural pronoun as if it somehow disproved the relevance of genes and evolution to human affairs: "Which . . . shall we choose? . . . Let us take this stand. . . . We can do otherwise. " And he too cites Marx's "wonderful aphorism" about making our own history and believes that Marx vindicated the concept of free will:
Marx himself had a much more subtle view than most of his contemporaries of the differences between human and natural history. He understood that the evolution of consciousness, and the consequent development of social and economic organization, introduced elements of difference and volition that we usually label as "free will. "24 {128}
Subtle indeed is the argument that explains free will in terms of its synonym "volition" (with or without "elements of difference," whatever that means) and attributes it to the equally mysterious "evolution of consciousness. " Basically, Rose and Gould are struggling to make sense of the dichotomy they invented between a naturally selected, genetically organized brain on one side and a desire for peace, justice, and equality on the other. In Part III we will see that the dichotomy is a false one.
The doctrine of the Pronoun in the Machine is not a casual oversight in the radical scientists' world view. It is consistent with their desire for radical political change and their hostility to "bourgeois" democracy. (Lewontin repeatedly uses "bourgeois" as an epithet. ) If the "we" is truly unfettered by biology, then once "we" see the light we can carry out the vision of radical change that we deem correct. But if the "we" is an imperfect product of evolution -- limited in knowledge and wisdom, tempted by status and power, and blinded by self-deception and delusions of moral superiority -- then "we" had better think twice before constructing all that history. As the chapter on politics will explain, constitutional democracy is based on a jaundiced theory of human nature in which "we" are eternally vulnerable to arrogance and corruption. The checks and balances of democratic institutions were explicitly designed to stalemate the often dangerous ambitions of imperfect hu~mans.
The Ghost in the Machine, of course, is far dearer to the political right than to the political left.
